Bowdich and the other Britons could not bear to witness any more executions, but they were told that all thirteen men died in a similar way and that numerous people, including women, had later been sacrificed for religious reasons. Hutchinson wrote that he had once come upon the headless bodies of two women lying in the market as vultures pecked at them. Vultures were sacred birds that could not be killed, and a woman who accidentally caught one in her basket was executed.42 Hutchinson also wrote about another execution scene that the king personally witnessed. Osei Bonsu sat drinking palm wine from a silver goblet while the executions proceeded. As each head was severed, the king, still seated, imitated a dancing motion, which apparently signified his pleasure.43 The Asante practice of execution, whether of criminals or for religious purposes, would plague the British conscience for the remainder of the century.
Bowdich was a gifted and reliable observer, but there was much about Asante culture that he could neither see nor readily comprehend.44 For one thing, he thought that King Osei Bonsu was an autocrat, a natural conclusion for someone who only saw the king on public occasions, when his role as absolute monarch was acted out to the fullest. It was true that many lesser officeholders displeased the king at their peril. One provincial administrator, who lived in Kumase in great luxury, traveled in such pomp that whenever he went anywhere, even a short distance, he insisted on being carried in his taffeta hammock, protected by a huge silk umbrella and accompanied by a troop of sycophants who constantly praised him. Some actually swept the ground he would walk on before he stepped out of his hammock. Yet when he overstepped his orders in trying to settle a provincial dispute, the king stripped him of all his property, leaving him a beggar.45
The king was the government’s chief executive, the commander in chief of its army, and the judge of its highest court. According to the Asante constitution, only he could order executions. In actuality, however, the king’s powers were greatly circumscribed, as some European visitors understood as early as 1819.46 Osei Bonsu was at pains to act as if his whim were law when in public, but where matters of significant import for the Asante state were at issue, he shared power with a national assembly of some two hundred men, representing all regions of the empire, that regularly managed the affairs of government and decided all disputes as a supreme tribunal. Its members were the senior chiefs of the traditional districts of the state. In addition, the king was advised—and sometimes dominated—by an inner council of eighteen nobles: powerful military commanders, some princes, major government officials such as the treasurer, some ceremonial officers, two of the king’s chamberlains, the head physician, a senior priest, and often most influential of all, the queen mother. The council—known as the Asante Kotoko, meaning the Asante porcupine (“no one dares touch them”)—ordinarily met every day with considerable pomp, attended by servants, court criers, soldiers, and the seemingly ever-present executioners. Frequently their deliberations continued under torchlight until late at night. Like the British privy council, the inner council was both a court of law and a legislature. In addition to the public deliberations of this body, these and other powerful people often had access to the king’s ear, and no prudent king would wisely offend the wealthiest and most powerful people in his realm. For example, the king once apologized to Joseph Dupuis, who visited Kumase in 1820, for a decision he had made, saying, “Don’t be angry … I must do what the old men say; I cantricts help it.”47 In every sense the king served at the pleasure of his most influential subjects and could be removed for misconduct, as would happen later in the century.
An Asante king owed his throne—his stool—to the political faction that put him in power. He had to retain their favor to survive, while doing as little as possible not to offend other powerful factions, some of which were led by aristocrats and members of the royal family.48 Four noble families wielded great power. Until recently they had not been subject to capital punishment, and one of these men ruled over the government when the king was out of Kumase. A wise king would go to extraordinary lengths to avoid offending these nobles. For example, when one of Osei Bonsu’s wives was accused of having sexual relations with another man, the king ordered her executed as Asante law permitted him to do. However, when he was informed that this particular wife was the daughter of a powerful noble and military commander, he quickly spared her and even offered her a gift of gold if she were to remarry.49
Despite these limitations on their power, Asante kings lived majestically. The palace staff was elaborate, and it did much to create an aura of majesty. Among the more than a score of separate departments established to serve the king were spokesmen, stool carriers, drummers, umbrella carriers, bathroom attendants, elephant-tail switchers, fan bearers, cooks, heralds, sword bearers, gun bearers, ministers, eunuchs, and the ubiquitous executioners.50 At several points around the city, particularly the great market, there were six-to eight-foot-high circular platforms of polished clay painted red, where the king sat under his great umbrella, greeting his subjects and sipping palm wine, which he ceremoniously allowed to drip through his beard to the ground. Palm wine was to be quaffed in a single gulp, and etiquette called for much of it to run down through a man’s beard.
Some fifty to one hundred of his attendants sat below him on steps cut into the platform. The chief of each district also occupied a stool and was supported by a similarly large and diverse staff of officials and retainers. This panoply of power served the king and his loyal chiefs well, but the actual governance of the nation was carried out by hundreds of bureaucrats concerned with such essentials as diplomacy, trade, and taxation. For example, because a central concern of the government was the prevention of the emergence of a powerful merchant class that might challenge royal power, laws were established restricting the accumulation of gold and slaves, the principal forms of wealth. Hundreds of government tax collectors belonging to the treasury department enforced a harsh estate tax by quickly descending on the house of anyone of substance who died. A very small percentage of his wealth was awarded to his heir, but the greater portion was confiscated and became the property of the king.51
Even though these taxes prevented the inheritance of wealth, nothing was more important to most Asante than its accumulation during their lifetime. A famous Asante proverb said that “one becomes famous not by being noble born but by being wealthy.”52 Another said, “If power is for sale, sell your mother to obtain it. Once you have the power there are several ways of getting her back.” For a people who so revered their parents, this was the ultimate sacrifice.53 Wealth was not only its own reward, it brought great social prestige and formal honors.
Some men, and a few women as well, became sufficiently wealthy through entrepreneurial activities that they were honored by the king as belonging to a kind of nobility, which was symbolized by the right to be preceded in public by troops of well-born boys, known as asikofo, who carried elephants’ tails. Such honor was done to such a distinguished person (the king, after all, would inherit his wealth) that the king would delegate some of his own sons to serve him and to carry the elephants’ tails.54 This honor was so coveted that at least one man was tempted to claim it fraudulently. During the reign of Osei Yaw (1824-1833), this man claimed to possess a great fortune that he willed to the King. Duly honored as a result, the man enjoyed the benefits of nobility, but when his large pots of gold were opened after his funeral, they were found to contain worthless brass filings. His disinterred corpse was tried, found guilty, and beheaded, depriving his soul of everlasting life.55
Given this national fascination with wealth, it is not surprising that there was a government department of the treasury that was greatly concerned with maintaining accurate weights and measures for gold and for assessing its purity. Assuring the safety and purity of the state’s gold called for many locked chests and gimlet-eyed guardians, and locks and keys were both necessary and a mark of personal prestige. There was also a need for careful accountants who were, needless to say, closely watched
. Although some literate persons were recruited to Kumase to enhance Asante diplomatic relations and some written records were kept, Asante was essentially a preliterate state. As a consequence, the Asante treasury featured overlapping responsibilities and many cross-checks against dishonesty.56 In 1819, desiring even tighter control over the treasury, Osei Bonsu eagerly sought to have his children receive a British education. British Resident Hutchinson was happy to oblige, and arrangements were well under way for some of his sons to go to Cape Coast and, perhaps, later to England. However, the “Aristocracy and Great Chiefs” opposed this innovation, and the king was forced to abandon the idea. The head of the exchequer, Opoku Frere, the second most powerful man in Asante, later confided to Hutchinson that the opposition arose because he and other wealthy men were accustomed to cheating the king “a little,” and they feared that they would be unable to continue this practice if the king’s relatives acquired a European education.57
Another source of power in the state was religion. The British referred to all Asante religious objects and activities as “fetish,” borrowing a Portuguese term that was used disparagingly to reduce them to a superstitious idolatry or a magical dread of certain objects. In reality the Asante had a complicated religion that recognized a supreme creator as well as numerous lesser gods, who took a more active interest in human affairs. The most powerful of these was the river god, Tano. Most houses contained a shrine to a particular god, who was propitiated in various ways. There were many religious ceremonies, too, along with beliefs in divination, evil spirits, magic, and witchcraft. It is not altogether clear how much power Asante priests (many of whom were women) had, but they did play a vital role in helping people deal with misfortune, sickness, and death. It is clear though that at times they opposed the king on certain issues and that there was an inherent tension beness, the priests and the monarch.58 Priests derived much of their power from the supernatural assistance of mmoatia, forest dwarfs who resembled small human beings except that they communicated only by whistling and their feet pointed backwards. Human sacrifice and small objects thought to have supernatural power were a part of Asante religious life, but they were hardly the totality of it.
Asante religion was centered around the belief that every person had an immortal soul. After death the soul became a spirit for a time, and if the person died prematurely or at the hands of another, that spirit could bring harm to the living. Most ancestral spirits, however, went quietly to the underworld, where life was lived much as it had been on earth. (This was one of the reasons why slaves were sacrificed to serve their masters and why a wife sometimes demanded to be sacrificed after her husband’s death.) These ancestors were thought to join with other supernatural forces to reward people who adhered to Asante values and laws and to punish offenders, keeping all on their best behavior. Sometimes these spirits took corporeal form as, for example, a huge bird with great talons that would swoop down on offenders at night. There were also red-haired albinos with flowing beards and very tall women with enormously pendulous breasts that could frighten wrongdoers to death.59 It was thought that eventually a person’s soul would be reborn through a woman of its own lineage.
One of Bowdich’s misconceptions that would be shared by almost all British political and military leaders who followed him to the Gold Coast was that the Asante “lived for war.” It is true that their army was a formidable instrument of power that must receive the credit for the success of the Asante expansion and nineteenth-century dominance over such a large area. It is also true that many senior Asante military commanders were, like British army officers, men who longed for the military action that could bring them glory, wealth, and power. Yet there had long been powerful proponents of peace in Asante who favored diplomacy and trade relationships over military conquest. Indeed, the Asante invested an inordinate amount of money and energy in the development of diplomacy. The government stressed the training of diplomats, who were instructed in the arts of negotiation and taught to respect the sanctity of treaties, a view that British officials often did not reciprocate in their treaty negotiations with the Asante.60 They made regular use of envoys and diplomatic missions in the search for peace. The highest-ranking diplomatic officers carried gold-hilted swords and a golden axe on their missions to symbolize their willingness to cut through any difficulty to achieve their purpose.61 The British misunderstanding of these symbols—that is, as threatening martial action—led them to dismiss several important Asante missions, and they would never understand the subtlety and allusiveness of the Asante negotiating style nor the fact that for many powerful Asante the greatest good was not war but peace, open roads, and trade.62 As a result, they consistently miscalculated Asante intentions—not surprising, given their contempt for Asante culture and their belief that the Asante sought only war.
War, indeed, had built the Asante Empire, but peace was necessary to maintain it because the Asante depended on tribute and trade. Except for the six districts that made up metropolitan Asante, all of the conquered districts paid an annual tribute. A relatively poor northern district that lacked gold might pay only five hundred slaves, two hundred cattle, four hundred sheep, and several hundred cotton and silk cloths to Kumase, but richer districts were assessed two thousand slaves as well as gold and other valuables.63 Tribute also included skilled labor such as doctors, potters, smiths, and leather workers and goods such as sandals, leather pouches, elephant tails, fly whisks, and musical instruments.64 Because the amount and kind of tribute a district could reasonably pay was subject to changing circumstances, a special court was established in Kumase to adjudicate such matters. The need to pay annual tribute was softened somewhat for tributary chiefs because the Asante king usually returned a portion of it as gifts.
In addition to tribute the Asante relied on trade, sending gold, ivory, and slaves south to the coast for firearms, gunpowder, and other European goods. To do so, they had to pass through the territory of sometimes hostile tributary people, such as the Fante, or use them as middlemen. Without a modicum of peace, the Asante could not obtain the weapons and gunpowder needed to maintain their army and control their subject states. They also required peace to continue their profitable trade to the north. In return for sea salt obtained at the coast and kola nuts that helped to suppress thirst in these arid lands, the Asante received the slaves they needed both to trade to the Europeans at the coast and to fuel their own economy. Salt was so valuable that a handful of it would often bring as many as two slaves in return. The trade in gold, ivory, and slaves was monopolized by the wealthy, but the commoners participated widely in the salt and kola nut exchange.65 Trade to the west and east was less important but it also took place.
To maintain these trade relationships, the Asante built and maintained a system of roads. At least five roads led north toward their tributary states, and an equal number fanned out to the south. Only two roads, both relatively unimportant, ran to the west or the east. Even when located in the relatively more open territory of the north, these roads required enormous manpower to build and more to maintain. Cutting roads through the dense tropical rain forest to the south required herculean efforts, as British military engineers discovered during their invasion of 1873/74. And preventing millions of rapidly growing roots, vines, and creepers from growing back called for continuous labor by thousands of men and women, most of whom were slaves. It also called for numerous detachments of highway police to assure the safe passage of goods up and down these roadways. The Asante government took great care to maintain a network of police and military depots to assure that trade would proceed peaceably and that taxes and tribute would flow to Kumase.
The Asante possessed more gold and used more of it as ornaments and symbols of rank than any other West African people. Much of the gold lay within metropolitan Asante, but many more rich deposits lay in districts that were tributary to them. The Portuguese were so impressed by the quantity of gold the Asante brought to the coast that they named their principal tradi
ng fort Elmina—“the mine.” Some gold was obtained by panning in streams—work almost entirely done by women and children—but much of the region was dotted with small mine pits dug a few yards into the earth. There were deep shafts as well, several dug one hundred feet deep before sending out tunnels several hundred feet in length. One mine had a timber-shored tunnel three hundred yards long with numerous large galleries where the gold was worked.66 To reach a vein of gold, miners had to chop their way through hard rock such as feldspar or granite, work that could only be done by men, and in some mines gunpowder was used to blast the rock away. The diggers gave the chunks of ore to women who carried it to crushing areas where men put it on granite slabs and pounded it to bits with hammers before women milled it to powder and washed it to separate the gold. The work was usually done by slaves supervised by the family they belonged to, but sometimes thousands of men, women, and children worked together to mine a rich reef of gold.67 In peak years as many as forty thousand mines were being worked.68
In law all gold belonged to the king, and some mines were directly managed by the treasury, but others were under local control. When a nugget was found, it was supposed to be taken to the local chief, who sent it on to the king, who in return sent the chief some gold dust as his commission. There were tight controls, and the chiefs’ spies were willing to report misconduct in anticipation of sharing a reward. Still there was cheating, especially after the gold had been reduced to dust when it could be adulterated with silver, copper, or coral.69 Gold may originally have been mined by the Asante themselves, but at least by the seventeenth century, slave labor was used almost exclusively, perhaps because shafts collapsed by heavy rains and rising groundwater made mining such a dangerous activity. Much gold was extracted by having a slave dig into the soil above a known reef, then handing the earth up for panning until he hit the water table. Slaves slept and ate in these pits, being fed by the freemen who panned the gold on the surface.70 So great was the Asante demand for slaves in these times that the Portuguese actually imported slaves to the Asante from as far away as Angola!71
The Fall of the Asante Empire Page 5